Well, yes, I suppose, but we (book readers; content consumers) appreciate that because it helps us find what we want. The value of a TOC is indeed greater than its cost. The same applies to search engines. Sure, putting all your eggs in one basket that you don’t control is a silly strategy. But one dynamic will not change any time soon…your content is worthless until it is found by someone who cares about it. Today, Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc., represent very important avenues through which people looking for content, find content. The reality is that most people will never own or control the most important avenues for content discovery. In that sense, most people will forever put a bunch of eggs in baskets controlled by others. Are these others, in general, "leeches"? Hardly; they actually create enormous value. As a little experiment, try abstaining from Google, Yahoo, MSN, or any of the other search engines for 30 days. See if you can be, as Seinfeld might say, a master of your domain of content. Even if the search giants (Google, et. al.) are replaced by something else, the fundamental dynamic will not change (your content is worthless until it is found by someone who cares about it). So at that time, it will be as important to be visible in whatever discovery technology replaced the giants, as it is today to be visible in the giants. -- F. Andy Seidl If search engines are leeches, then human internet users are as well. Search engines were originally designed to satisfy humans – a way of creating operationally efficient models for finding stuff. Today, search engines exist for precisely the same reason – to help humans discover content of interest without forcing us [each] to read 100% of the content on the web. If [indeed] search engines are sucking the value out of the web, then it must be assumed that this drawback is the expected cost of having a web. "I'm not saying ditch Search. I'm saying strive to be Search independent. If the engines dropped you tomorrow, how much traffic would you lose?" -- Nick Wilson
We have always advised our clients to write for humans, not search engines -- because search engines (in the long run) will always be reflective of what humans want. If they didn’t reflect human requirements, they wouldn’t get used, would they? (e.g., In 1997, why did everyone switch from AltaVista to Google?) And in all this, not a single mention about the long tail of search. ;-) -- Bill French | 
